First and foremost, a quick apology to my zero regular readers for letting this go dark for so long. I'm hoping things have stabilized enough after an odd year or so to get back to this on a more regular basis. This blog exists for two main reasons... first, as a place where I can organize my thoughts on a topic and second, as an excuse to spend some time writing, which happens to be one of my favorite past times.
I won't get into anything too high level here like I've tried to do with some of the other entries from the past, but I want to take a moment to look at the podcast, Serial, because I believe there's a bigger context here than just an iTunes rating of the podcast itself. For starters, Serial is a weekly podcast that investigates a particular story meticulously over the course of a season. The use of the word season in this case is a little misleading because a podcast format doesn't restrict the time spent on a season the way a television show might. Theoretically, a season could last two years if that's how the investigation played out.
Serial's host and creator, Sarah Koenig, currently a long-time producer for This American Life, has also been a journalist for such outfits as the Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, and ABC News. Her work in 2006 on This American Life's "Habeus Schmabeus" episode won her the prestigious Peabody Award. She decided to take a look at the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore, MD. Lee's ex-boyfreind, Adnan Syed, ended up getting a life sentence for her killing, all while maintaining his innocence.
Warning, I'm about to discuss events that take place during the first eight episodes of Serial's first season. There will be spoilers, in a sense.
Friends of Adnan ended up contacting Koenig because, during her time at The Baltimore Sun, she had written an article about a defense attorney who had been disbarred for mishandling client money. This defense attorney just happened to be Adnan Syed's attorney, who Syed's friends believe may have punted the case to make more money on appeals. So Koenig takes a cursory look over some court files and news articles, speaks to Syed's friends who initiated contact, and decides to dive into the case.
Serial has released eight episodes so far, each one covering a certain aspect of the case. The first starts with Syed's alibi and why it felt so weak. Another covers the vast inconsistencies of the State's primary witness against Syed. Another covers cell phone records, or re-enacting the timeline the State put forward as what they believed happened the day of Lee's murder. Aside from becoming an iTunes phenomenon, Serial has also brought a great deal of attention to a case that no one, outside those directly affected, remembers.
Having said that, I feel Serial has some real intrinsic problems that go with the glaring procedural problems of the case itself. Without doing a beat by beat synopsis of the podcast to date (you honestly should go listen to it, because despite my forthcoming complaints, it's still a really enjoyable podcast), right off the bat, Koenig states that she's not a detective, not a private investigator, nor even a crime reporter. I appreciated that admission because I had hoped that it meant she would head to experts in different areas straight away. Instead, she plays amateur sleuth, which can make for good storytelling, but I'm not always sure it serves the subjects of the story.
There are humanizing sequences where she vents frustration about how something in the case feels, or where she lets Adnan describe his state of mind having experienced what he claims is a wrongful conviction. Sometimes, however, I get the feeling these very nebulous, emotional beats, are serving as some form of foundation for Koenig's investigating. Adnan seems like a nice guy that couldn't hurt anyone, Adnan's inability to remember certain things about the day in question feels suspicious, things like that. I know Koenig probably can't help but have her feelings about Syed sway her, just as the jury that convicted Syed let their feelings sway them, but sometimes I feel like it overpowers what should be an investigation. To Koenig's credit, she's not blindly assuming Syed's innocence, and when something doesn't look good, she gets it out there - such as dedicating an entire episode to the case against Syed. But I don't always feel like any progress comes from these asides so to speak.
Beyond that, there sometimes seem to be lapses in critical thinking. Again I won't list every moment I felt this way with accompanying time code, but one example would be during her attempt to reenact the State's timeline surrounding Lee's killing. Essentially, the State claimed that Syed had roughly 21 minutes to be dismissed from the final class of the day, get in his car, drive over to a Best Buy parking lot, strangle Lee, move her body to the trunk, and place a call from a nearby payphone. So Koenig and her producer give it a shot. The halls are congested, school buses block egress from the parking lot, the streets leading to Best Buy are major roads with traffic and constant stop lights, but when Koenig's experiment is done, they believe they managed to squeeze everything into 21 minutes. It came down to the wire, but they checked everything off the list in eighteen or nineteen minutes, leaving about 90 seconds for the actual strangulation, so they declared it possible.
I know it seems petty, but I bet many adults could hold their breath for ninety seconds in a real pinch. The only people who strangulate that quickly are victims in movies and TV shows to save time and spare the audience the horror of watching someone killed over the course of many minutes. On the air, when Koenig declared that there was 90 seconds for the deed itself, she never stopped to wonder if that was long enough before continuing on and stating that the State's timeline felt like it could happen. When it comes time to attack the logic or facts driving the case either way, I hear Koenig's opening admission in my head and worry that she might not be qualified for this investigation on some important levels. It takes six or seven episodes before Serial gets into bringing Syed's case to an Innocence Project team lead by a UVA law professor for some review. Maybe that was the first thing Koenig did and just structured the show differently, but since all I can react to is how the show is structured, I feel like it took a while to involve people actually qualified to ask the questions she is attempting to ask.
But what's really disturbing is the even more egregious lack of critical thinking involved on the professional side of the case. Two police detectives who seemed to do an incredibly shoddy job half the time due to the worst case of verification bias (something another consulting detective specifically harps on before stating that the two investigation detectives did a good job - not sure how that works). The main witness against Syed swings his story all over the place, information feels cherry picked to support the detectives' preferred explanations, certain facts are just plugged into the timeline because it makes the most sense rather than because that's when the event took place. Not sure if this will come up on a future episode, but one of the investigating detectives seems to be named in a lawsuit involving shitty police work and maybe some more verification bias. I guess innocent until proven guilty doesn't necessarily apply to the cops trying to make the case in the first place.
My entire law enforcement experience can be summed up by saying I love The Wire, meaning I have none whatsoever. So I can't understand the pressures to close cases or hit numbers or what it feels like to think I've seen this before and that I'm smart enough to cut to the chase rather than let the case and evidence take me where it needs to go. Listening to Serial, I can't help but feel that the investigating detectives brought a lot of biases to the process... not racial, just thinking they have it solved before they actually have it solved and then putting the blinders on. Maybe that's Serial not yet giving the detectives their due credit, but it's hard not to think that the police did a poor job at times and what's strange is then having Koenig or the consulting detective praise the work as solid. If this is an example of solid detective work, then God help the person at the wrong end of shitty work.
So that's the kind of thing the prosecuting attorney gets handed in the Syed case, and to Serial's credit in what struck me as the strongest moment of the podcast so far, Koenig gets on tape the Innocence Project UVA attorney highlighting the difference between "can you get a conviction" and "should you get a conviction." Does convicting Syed conclusively solve Lee's murder, or does it merely represent a case clearance? Serial presents the prosecuting attorney as doing the best with what's he's got instead of questioning what it means if this is the best he's got. Again, I can't help but feeling that critical thinking dies a little bit more with each step of the process.
Which leaves the jury, and I hope future episodes go a little further into the jury because despite what seems like the very definition of reasonable doubt smearing every aspect of this case, they managed to convict Syed in less than two hours. Something happens that quickly, it can only mean the jury was absolutely convinced of its decision. The juror interviewed talked about how they completely believed the single, lying witness against Syed. Sure the witness admitted to lying about half the things, but the three things he never seemed to waiver on were enough to erase all reasonable doubt. Again, this gut instinct steering the course of justice without the obvious application of critical thought.
I sometimes wonder what this podcast would have been had Koenig teamed up with experts right from the beginning and presented the story that way? I'm sure we still would have gotten the somewhat arbitrary reenactment conclusively demonstrating not much, I'm sure we would have gotten Koenig's slightly awkward but endearing usage of narcotic street slang, but I also feel that we could have cut through the low-hanging fruit bullshit that seems to obscure a lot of this case as presented. I'm not saying Syed is innocent, but it's pretty hard not to be convinced that when a victim deserved justice and a man's life was in the balance, short cuts and predispositions and mediocre efforts ruled the day. Again, as presented so far in Serial, it seems like it would be easy to eviscerate the case as laid out in court and I can't tell if Koenig is choosing not to, or, to go back to her initial admission about her qualifications, she's not in a position to do so.
The Innocence Project team at UVA agrees to put a team on the case in episode seven, and they manage to break down a number of issues with the state's case. Again, I don't mean to imply Syed's innocence or guilt, but it doesn't take long to point out that not everyone brought their A game to this endeavor. That's what struck me the most about Serial so far, it got me thinking about how often the B game shows up to the table. I don't mean to imply the people aren't trying their best or doing what they think is best, but it feels like it falls short in fairly apparent ways. The investigating detectives, some of Koenig's analysis, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the jury, Kansas voters reelecting Gov. Brownback, Congress, this blog...
At some point it feels a bit crushing, leaving me to wonder if those truly capable of bringing an A game would rather avoid many of the processes we have to get things done. It's hard to imagine some of our finest minds choosing to become a detective despite the importance of the work at times. And I think we've all seen first hand that politics doesn't attract our top minds most of the time either, and those systems impact all of our lives in so many ways.
Now, having said all of that, what I truly admire about Serial is that I feel it finally brings to light the potential of The Podcast. Some podcasts are simply rebroadcasts of shows on the radio or TV. With Serial, we finally get to see a podcast, with its lack of imposed structure or restrictions that saddle broadcast efforts, explore something in a way unique to the format. Maybe other shows have done it, but I'm willing to bet few have had the widespread exposure and success Serial appears to have. I believe Serial legitimizes the format, and I look forward to what this kind of freedom allows other investigative journalists to explore.
